A surpirse for Ahmadinejad in Iran election

Independent:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has suffered a setback with the election to parliament of the former nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, a personal enemy who challenged him in 2005's presidential election.

Mr Larijani won a landslide victory in the holy city of Qom in last Friday's election, winning more than 70 per cent of the vote. He is now a favourite to become the parliament's speaker as his alliance of "pragmatic conservatives" has cut into the parliamentary majority of Mr Ahmadinejad's supporters. It has also placed Mr Larijani in pole position for another run against Mr Ahmadinejad in the presidential election next year.

"It sends a subliminal message that he has the backing of the religious mullahs," said one Western diplomat in Tehran.

Mr Larijani resigned last year as chief nuclear negotiator after falling out with the President over his confrontational tactics with the West. But the President's erstwhile allies, including the Mayor of Tehran, Mohamed Baqer Qalibaf who also nurses presidential ambitions, were also critical of the President's economic policies which have caused high inflation and unemployment. Many Iranians said that the economy was their main concern in the parliamentary vote, whose outcome will not affect the nuclear stand-off between Iran and the West.

Neither Mr Larijani nor Mr Qalibaf, a former police chief who ordered a vicious crackdown against university students in 1999, are particularly moderate, but they are compared with the radical President.

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Moderation is a subjective judgment in Tehran. Ahmadinejad appears to have gone to the Hugo Chavez school of economics creating high inflation and unemployment at the same time. If they did not have oil they might even earn honors in the Robert Mugabe school of economics. Iran still doe snot have free and fair elections and still prohibits those who do not earn the approval of the ayatollahs in charge from running. Religious bigots and despots still control the levers of power and if the new so called moderates attempted to do something that the mullahs did not want, they would find out how little power they have.